Category: Politics
If anyone was hoping the election would deliver some form of reprieve from the hundreds of overlapping claims for the foreshore and seabed, resulting from National’s disastrous Marine and Coastal Area Act, they will be sorely disappointed.
The country’s new Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister have claimed that free market capitalism is failing New Zealand. Their comments indicate that they intend blaming areas of government and policy failure on capitalism.
I spent 11 wonderful years living and working in New Zealand, from 1993 to 2004. During that whole time one of my pet peeves was the MMP voting system, one of the world’s most proportional systems and the one the Americans imposed on the Germans after World War II.
“NZ Shock: Losers take power” was the headline in The Australian newspaper on Friday. They are not wrong. It is a shock to many that the party with substantially more votes than any other party is now in opposition.
So there we have it. MMP at work. A party that receives 7.2% of the vote gets to choose who runs the country. And they choose a party that received 36.9% of the vote, and that party enters into a coalition agreement with another party that received 6.3% of the vote.
Winston Peters, the 2017 General Election ‘Kingmaker’, is yet to choose New Zealand’s new government. The widespread speculation that the coalition negotiating window set by New Zealand First was too tight, has turned out to be correct.
The Trump administration released a thumbnail sketch last week of its much anticipated tax plan, which has generated opposition and support from all the usual suspects.
The 446,000 Special Votes cast during last month’s election have now been counted. According to the Electoral Commission, the final election tally gives National 56 seats, Labour 46 seats, New Zealand First 9 seats, the Greens 8 seats, and ACT one seat.
The only thing that can be said with any certainty about the next New Zealand government is that it will look very different from the last one. National party prime minister Bill English won an emphatic 13-seat majority over the opposition Labour party in an election result that defied the pattern of history.
The election is over and voters have had their say. Now the MMP horse-trading begins. Elected MPs are the ones who will chose our new Prime Minister and deliver an administration that can command the 61 vote majority in the House that’s necessary to govern New Zealand.
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